Hawai'i Skies

Daily Smile

Hawaiʻi Scene on Social

Adopt a Pet

Daily Features

ASD icon blue inverse lighter

ASD Staff

Corgi said, important half-time water break...

Smile 26 4 6 2

Daily Smile: Monday, April 6, 2026

Smile 26 4 5

Daily Smile: Sunday, April 5, 2026

Smile 26 4 4

Daily Smile: Saturday, April 4, 2026

They say if your dog is smart, they will put their paw against the wall...

Smile 26 4 3

Daily Smile: Friday, April 3, 2026

Baby cow making friends with a baby donkey...

Smile 26 4 2

Daily Smile: Thursday, April 2, 2026

Smile 26 4 1

Daily Smile: Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Now let's all enjoy a dog showing a cat how to take a bath...

Smile 3 31 26

Daily Smile: Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Smile 26 3 30

Daily Smile: Monday, March 30, 2026

Smile 26 3 29

Daily Smile: Sunday, March 29, 2026

This is Summit. He is a friend to pretty much everyone he meets.......

Smile 26 3 28

Daily Smile: Saturday, March 28, 2026

Smile 26 3 27

Daily Smile: Friday, March 27, 2026

Man takes his dog to the park just so he can ride his favorite toy horses....

Smile 26 3 26

Daily Smile: Thursday, March 26, 2026

Dog waits until his owner reaches the end to go....

Smile 26 3 25

Daily Smile: Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Smile 26 3 24

Daily Smile: Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Now let's all enjoy a fat dog running in snow with helicopter tail.....

Smile 26 3 23

Daily Smile: Monday, March 23, 2026

Smile 26 3 22

Daily Smile: Sunday, March 22, 2026

This is Albie. He was so touched by his family singing happy birthday in his native language that he didn't notice the cupcakes with his face on them.....

Smile 26 3 20

Daily Smile: Friday, March 20, 2026

I will never know peace like this on this earth.....

Smile 26 3

Daily Smile: Saturday, March 21, 2026

Smile 26 3 19

Daily Smile: Thursday, March 19, 2026

When a service dog sits in front of you on a plane...

Smile 26 3 18

Daily Smile: Wednesday, March 18, 2026

This pug was caught in a clover-load of photos...

Smile 26 3 17

Daily Smile: Tuesday, March 17, 2026

Smile 26 3 16

Daily Smile: Monday, March 16, 2026

Smile 26 3 15

Daily Smile: Sunday, March 15, 2026

It really doesn't get more terrifying than this...

Smile 26 3 14

Daily Smile: Saturday, March 14, 2026

Smile 26 3 13

Daily Smile: Friday, March 13, 2026

Smile 26 3 12

Daily Smile: Thursday, March 12, 2026

You know the saddest thing about betrayal? It never comes from the enemy...

Smile 26 3 11

Daily Smile: Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Government & Politics

Columnists

In the spring of 2024, Hawai‘i did something unusual: It cut income taxes.

Its backers called it the largest income tax cut in state history. A family of four earning the median household income of $91,000 would see their tax bill drop by 

Rep. Kyle Yamashita, then House Finance chair, 

 “a foundational piece in restructuring our tax code.” For once, the language wasn’t empty — because Yamashita had a plan.

Hawai‘i has some of the lowest property taxes in the nation — low enough, he argued, to draw out-of-state buyers in. About 30% of homes statewide are owned by outside buyers, 

, driving up prices and pushing local families out. The problem? The state doesn’t control property taxes. Counties do. And counties, facing their own pressures, weren’t going to raise them on their own.

, Yamashita suggested cutting off the GET surcharge revenue the state shares with the counties: “We stop giving the counties money, and then they have to make that shift.” The cut wasn’t only relief for working families. It was the opening move in a longer game — starve state revenue, force spending cuts, and squeeze the counties into doing what the Legislature couldn’t: raise property taxes.

The plan rested on a quiet bet that Yamashita would still be Finance chair when it came time for Step Two.

When Nadine Nakamura took the speakership, the factions that had kept Yamashita in place shifted around him. Rep. Chris Todd 

 as Finance chair. The memo offered no reason, only that “the House has decided to move in a new direction.” Todd said “basic math” meant lawmakers would have to recoup the lost tax revenue.

 the last five years of the cuts, keeping roughly $1.8 billion in state revenue. The House 

 39 to 11. The Senate has held firm. Ways and Means Chair Donovan Dela Cruz called the 2024 cuts “landmark legislation” while noting 

 — and a clash between the two chambers is coming.

Hawai‘i has been here before — the state passed an income tax cut in 1998. Then came the Great Recession. In 2009, 

. The pattern holds: the first thing cut when revenues fall is whatever tax relief was promised last.

Yamashita’s read on the tax structure was correct as far as it went. Hawai‘i taxes income hard and property lightly — a levy on people who work here and a break for people who park wealth here.

But the reason the state taxes heavily and the counties lightly is because PreK-12 education is handled at the state level. Hawai‘i is the only state with a statewide school district. We’re budgeting around $2.6 billion for that district this year. All other states handle education at the county level. The most direct path to reform runs through education.

Yamashita saw the bind: the state had to shed power to the counties — starting with education — or find new ways to tax. But his solution was naive. A state income tax cut was never going to shrink state government. It was going to produce exactly what happened: A push to reverse the cuts and hand the state 

 to the state — two provisions that sit on opposite sides of the same problem. Changing those provisions takes a constitutional amendment or a constitutional convention. That is a long, hard fight. It needs staying power that Hawai‘i’s shifting politics cannot provide.

Yamashita’s removal proved something. Reform depends less on good ideas than on staying power. The people pushing reform have to outlast it, or the next person through the door reverses it.

In any policy fight, the temptation is to find the right champion and trust the outcome to him. Hawai‘i is more prone to this than most. It’s a small state where a few chairs hold great power, and one upset can shuffle the whole deck. We look to princes because the system makes princes look powerful. But the psalmist had seen enough throne rooms to know how that ends: 

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.

Lawmakers who voted for those cuts owe their voters something: cut spending first. The harder talk still needs to happen — a constitutional amendment, or a constitutional convention. That’s the only path to reform that doesn’t depend on one chairman keeping his seat.

Yamashita

<title>The missing step</title>

When the Hawai‘i state Legislature passed historic tax cuts in 2024, it was meant to be the first step in a two-step plan to restructure Hawai‘i's tax code by state Rep. Kyle Yamashita, then chair of the House Finance committee. Then he lost the chairmanship, the House voted to take back the cuts and Yamashita's plan has gone missing. ASD columnist Sterling Higa explores what might have been.

The missing step

Stand-up comedian Tumua is doing crowd work somewhere on the Mainland, and 

 from the audience. The guy is from Kauaʻi, not born and raised, but “flown there, grown there.” He hasn’t lived there in nine years. While Tumua works the crowd, the guy shouts “chee hoo.” Tumua says, “That’s a solid chee hoo, man.” He does it again. Tumua has to shush him.

It’s a small moment, and Tumua plays it off with dry affection. The guy is playing out what he remembers of a place he left nine years ago. Much of the crowd never lived there at all.

Frank De Lima didn’t have that problem performing locally. Most of his audience hadn’t left. They were in the room — sharing the same plate lunch memories, cringing at the same accents, laughing because every joke was an inside joke. This wasn’t an introduction to local culture. It was a reminder, a celebration, even a reinforcement.

The plantation village was a truly different kind of place — shared land, shared labor, ethnic groups pressed close together with no way out. Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Hawaiians were all crowded into the same neighborhoods and schools. What came out of it — the food, the humor, the pidgin — came from people who couldn’t opt out of each other.

Even as that world was dissolving, people reached back for its symbols. By 1978, a political movement called Palaka Power had taken the plantation worker’s cloth as its name — a clear link to the past. The Palaka Power 

 said so plainly. The writers also noted, in the same breath: the ILWU was declining, sugar and pine would soon be gone, the Democrats of the ‘54 Revolution had mostly left the arena. They chose the symbol precisely because the reality was already receding. The myth was always partly constructed. But it was backed, then, by people who had actually 

The built world that replaced the plantation village included public housing, suburbs, and apartments. The Mainland has all of those. And then came radio, television, the internet, smartphones, and eventually TikTok.

Stand in the Sandy Beach parking lot on a Saturday. A kid near the lifeguard stand is hitting a vape and dancing to a song trending in Atlanta. The shaka sticker on the bumper is working harder than it used to. But social media didn’t cause any of this. It arrived to find the flattening of culture mostly finished and has been tracking it ever since.

The audience for local content skews diaspora: Aunties in Vallejo, Kalihi kids now in Las Vegas, people holding onto something they can’t quite name.

Nostalgia is real. But it runs in one direction. You can package a memory and ship it to Fresno. What you can’t do is put it back. A friend put it plainly: are we our own cover band?

Distinct cultures are not accidents. They grow from particular people living side by side. The plantation village wasn’t a brand. It was a neighborhood. The shaka sticker can travel, but the neighborhood can’t. Something real is lost when a place becomes content.

. He’s reaching for something he actually had, once. What is it, exactly? The memory of a place, a people. The kind of memory that swells within and erupts in shouts — or tears. It’s the memory that many hold of Hawai‘i, even those who visited only for a week.

Nostalgia can become sinful when we deceive ourselves. It’s easy to romanticize farm labor from the comfort of air-conditioned offices, but the plantations were not a paradise. And neither is Hawai‘i. The past is worth a visit, but no place to make a home. 

That’s a solid chee hoo, man — but once is enough. Shush.

Pineapple Plantation housing 16x9 Large

<title>What's in a chee hoo?</title>

Generations removed from the plantation era that forged it, local culture is in danger of becoming a nostalgia-fueled performance of itself, writes ASD columnist Sterling Higa.

What's in a chee hoo?

Christian Shimabuku Headshot

Christian Shimabuku

Sports

An NCAA Tournament men's volleyball match hasn't been played at the Stan Sheriff Center since 2004, but if the University of Hawai‘i continues its winning ways, that could change in a matter of weeks. 

The NCAA men's volleyball tournament has expanded by one team each year since having seven teams in 2023. In 2026, the NCAA is making a sizable jump to 12 teams after having nine teams in the field in 2025. 

The new format in 2026 consists of the top four seeds hosting pods of three teams. After the two lower seeds in each region play each other, the winner will play the host team. Hosts and dates will be determined during the NCAA selection show on April 26. 

Each regional winner will then meet at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion from May 9-11 for the national semifinals and finals. 

In 2026, the University of Hawai‘i is currently 21-3 overall and off to a 4-0 start in Big West Conference play. The Rainbow Warriors are the No. 2 team in the country behind UCLA in both the AVCA national poll and RPI rankings. 

Although the 'Bows would be in line to host a regional as it currently stands, head coach Charlie Wade doesn't want to assume anything quite yet. 

"Pretty exciting," Wade says of the possibility of hosting a regional. "But I'm somewhat reserved on that, just from past experiences. Typically, the NCAA flying people out here has been a challenge for them to make that decision. So, we're just focused on winning as many games we can to put ourselves in a position that we're considered to be one of those teams."

The 'Bows are nearly halfway done with Big West Conference play, sweeping No. 8 UC Santa Barbara over the weekend, which was preceded by a 

convincing series sweep at Long Beach State the week before

Another test awaits the Rainbow Warriors this week in a road series at UC Irvine on Friday and Saturday. The Anteaters are currently the No. 5 team in RPI as well as in the AVCA poll. After flying back home for a few days, the 'Bows will hit the road again for a two-match series at UC San Diego on April 10 and 11. 

"We've been doing it for a while," Wade says of the back-and-forth travel between O‘ahu and California. "They're pretty used to it. I feel pretty confident that we'll be ready to play."

For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up 

Kainoa Wade 040126

<title>No. 2 Hawai‘i men's volleyball on pace to host NCAA Tournament match</title>

If the Rainbow Warriors maintain their winning ways, an NCAA Tournament match could be played at the Stan Sheriff Center in May, thanks to an expanded field in 2026.

No. 2 Hawai‘i men's volleyball on pace to host NCAA Tournament match

Yamachika Tom IMG 1913 Large

Tom Yamachika

Viewpoints

Tax season is here. Most of us dread the prospect of filling out and filing our tax returns. We have to bare our souls to the government every year at about this time, telling them intimate details of what we made and what we lost — but at least that information is kept private so your nosy neighbor down the street can’t see it or use it to set up spam marketing lists.

One bill still moving in the Legislature, 

That bill has what seems to be a noble purpose of collecting good and accurate data to evaluate the dozens of income tax credits and general excise tax exemptions that we now have. “Regular evaluation strengthens accountability, supports sound budget decisions, ensures equitable competition, and ultimately maximizes benefits for taxpayers,” the bill preamble reads. So far, so good.

To gather this data, the bill says that people who are claiming credits and exemptions hereafter need to file an information statement with DBEDT. That statement would contain the taxpayer’s name, GE license number if it is a GET exemption, the name of the credit or exemption being claimed, the amount of credit or exemption being claimed, and the total cost to the state for the taxable year. This statement would be filed on or before the date on which the taxpayer’s annual return is filed, and filing the statement would be a condition of claiming the credit or exemption, meaning that if you don’t file this statement in addition to your tax return, the credit or or exemption that you are trying to claim will be disallowed.

And, by the way, the statement filed with DBEDT is not confidential. It is open to public inspection.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Whoa."}]

So, according to this bill, it isn’t enough to file just one tax return any more. You need to file two of them. And one of them will be open to the public.

This bill is going to affect lots more people than, perhaps, its proponents intended. Suppose you are an employee making $50,000. You might not know this, but you are taking advantage of a GET exemption (HRS section 237-24(6)) for salaries and wages. That’s why you don’t have to file a GET return.  So, under this bill you need to file a public statement declaring your salary, and if you don’t your $50,000 becomes subject to GET. $2,250 please. Plus penalties and interest, of course.

Never mind that the State Auditor is already tasked with evaluating these same credits and exemptions on a rolling basis. 

And what’s the theory behind requiring a taxpayer to disclose not only the credit or exemption amount but also the cost to the state? Isn’t that easy enough to calculate just from the credit or exemption amount (credit amount = cost to the state, exemption amount x tax rate = cost to the state)?

It seems that the information the state needs to analyze the revenue impact of credits and exemptions is already filed with the tax returns. Why, then, don’t we simply open the information pipeline from DOTAX to DBEDT to allow them to pull statistics to do their data analyses? This is what the Feds do. Internal Revenue Code 6103(j) says that certain agencies such as the Department of Commerce may access statistical tax return information to do their analyses and studies.

Somebody needs to rewrite this bill or put it out of its misery.